take your answer off the air...

Talker's MagazineThe quirky talk radio trade mag. Check the Talk Radio Research Project- it's not very scientific, but places on the top 15 talkers list (scroll down to Talk Radio Audiences By Size)) are as hotly contested as Emmys (and mean just about as much).

The AdvocateNo, not THAT Advocate... it's the Northwest Progressive Institute's Official Blog.

Media MattersDocumentation of right-wing media in video, audio and text.

Orcinushome of David Neiwert, freelance investigative journalist and author who writes extensively about far-right hate groups

Hominid Views"People, politics, science, and whatnot"
Darryl is a statistician who fights imperialism with empiricism, gives good links and wry commentary.

Jesus' General An 11 on the Manly Scale of Absolute Gender, a 12 on the Heavenly Scale of the 10 Commandments and a 6 on the earthly scale of the Immaculately Groomed.

Irrational Public Radio "informs, challenges, soothes and/or berates, and does so with a pleasing vocal cadence and unmatched enunciation. When you listen to IPR, integrity washes over you like lava, with the pleasing familiarity of a medium-roast coffee and a sensible muffin."

The Moderate VoiceThe voice of reason in the age of Obama, and the politics of the far-middle.

News Hounds Dogged dogging of Fox News by a team who seems to watch every minute of the cable channel so you don't have to.

HistoryLinkFun to read and free encyclopedia of Washington State history. Founded by the late Walt Crowley, it's an indispensable tool and entertainment source for history wonks and surfers alike.

right-wing blogs we like

The Reagan WingHearin lies the real heart of Washington State Republicans. Doug Parris runs this red-meat social conservative group site which bars no holds when it comes to saying who they are and who they're not; what they believe and what they don't; who their friends are and where the rest of the Republicans can go. Well-written, and flaming.

The fact is: technology caught the killer, not Detective
Reichert's dogged shoe-leather sleuthing as his press so dramatically
implies. Even then, on Sheriff Reichert's watch, the saliva sample that
could have busted Ridgway as early as 1996 when the DNA technology
became available.

Frank Atchley, who supervised Reichert in the 1980s, told the P-I
that Reichert "actually was more of an impediment to the investigation.
He was probably the worst detective I've ever worked with," Atchley
said. "He developed tunnel vision."

He's talking about Reichert's lock on one suspect: an ornery cab
driver named Melvyn Foster. They had butted heads in an interview early
on and Guillén writes, "... an acrimony developed that seemed to taint
Reichert's judgment on Foster's viability as a suspect for years." He
was so convinced of Foster's guilt, the task force focus disasterously
excluded everyone else.

Prothero says, "Reichert was obsessed." Records given the defense
show that Foster preoccupied Reichert. He had him followed, searched
his property, even consulted self-proclaimed psychic Barbara
Kubik-Patton, an acquaintance of Foster's who reported such minutiae as
what the cabbie had eaten for breakfast- all of which was meticulously
recorded in Reichert's journal.

"Foster successfully pushed Reichert's buttons," says Guillén, "in
the end, his ego and stubbornness railroaded the investigation at its
most critical time." When they couldn't develop a case against the
cabbie, the police had no other viable suspects, so they disbanded the
task force; thus crippling the investigation and leaving it seriously
undermanned.

It took years to eliminate Foster, according to Guillén, and "...
the damage had been done. Valuable time and resources were wasted while
the killings continued."

There were more screw-ups under Reichert's lead. "It had been
Reichert," writes Prothero, "who had been at the Green River the day
that Debra Bonner's body had been found... [and] had discovered Opal
Mills' body... three days later when it was too late to put
surveillance up around the river area..."

Debra Bonner's body had been found in the Green River Aug. 12, 1982,
but Reichert failed to stake out the area until too it was late to
catch Ridgway who dumped Opal Mills' body there three days later.
According to Prothero, the surveillance was not established until
Aug.15- not three days earlier as Reichert implies in his book.

When not kissing its ass or trying to manage the news, Reichert has
always been quick to scapegoat the media. Reichert blames KIRO TV for
blowing that stake-out with their helicopters when actually, there was
never any surveillance until after the second body was found.

"This failure, of course" writes Prothero, "opened the way for the
later victimization of nearly 65 women at the hands of a killer they
had failed to watch out for at a time when it might have done some
good."

No small part of this was because of Reichert's insistence that
Debbie Bonner's killing was not connected to the earlier murder of
Wendy Coffield. This was later acknowledged by task force commanders as
one of the most critical failures in the whole investigation.

"Dave Reichert," says Guillén, "has always had a big ego and an attitude of 'you do it my way or it's not going to get done.'"

After they caught Ridgway, a truck painter at PACCAR with an IQ of
82, defense attorneys made a deal with Prosecutor Norm Maleng: For
Gary's giving up the locations of 47 bodies, they'd spare him from the
death penalty. It was a politically brave and controversial decision on
Republican Maleng's part and Reichert, to his credit, supported it.

Installed in a secret bunker, the task force began a long
interrogation- difficult because a) Gary was a lying sack of shit, and
b) he was stupid to boot. Prothero says he did some things from time to
time to throw the task force off, but it was more luck than anything.
"Wily? It's a stretch to get to that."

All manner of tactics were used, and eventually the cops and
prosecutors got most of what Gary had, but it was hard work. Throughout
the months, he had memory lapses, and exasperated interrogators by
stonewalling them about specifics and motives behind his horrific
debauchery against the women both before and after he killed them.

In one of the most craven of his political moves, Reichert, hair
shining brilliantly, and resplendent in his sheriff's suit,
interrogated Ridgway one on one, eyeball to eyeball; making it a point
to be the last cop to question the vicious, murdering, dim-witted
necrophiliac. The video was rolling.

"He was not there to gain anything substantive," says Prothero.
"This was just an opportunity for Reichert to get those sound and video
bites memorialized."

Reichert really hoped he might get a headline out of Gary. With
cameras catching every word, he used every technique he knew- and a few
he thought up on the spot to pry something new out of Gary. "We saw the
whole spectrum," says Prothero, "the weird, the normal, the abnormal;
the easy-going, the intense."

The sheriff used every technique except one that worked.

Ridgway is a dull chameleon-like nebbish whose life's MO was to
camouflage himself by saying whatever he thought it took to please
whomever he was talking to- which is one of the reasons he was so
successful killing so long and prolifically without being caught. He
melted into whatever landscape he inhabited, then had sex with it,
strangled it, and dumped it somewhere.

Playing good cop, and bad cop often on the same day, Reichert
plunged in, alternating between accusing Gary of lying and puffing him
up for eluding them for so long. He tried to bond with Gary- after all,
they had lots in common- both dyslexic and liked chicks; both raised in
South King County by domineering mothers.

When this didn't work, Reichert incredibly tried to make Gary
jealous by saying he'd go out with Gary's wife after he was in prison.

"It
was just gratuitous on Reichert's part, ridiculous," says Prothero, who
watched it on live video from another room. "He was tormenting the
captive by rubbing salt in the wounds."

At one memorable point, photographed for posterity and future
political use, Reichert locked eyes with Gary, leaned in and tried to
stare him down. Politically, it was again inspired, as an interrogation
technique, it was a mistake. Ridgway had already bartered for his life;
he had nothing to lose.

Guillén says: "Serial killers live inside themselves for years.
They're used to staring at walls, staring at women, staring at police.
Gary just sat there and went back into his personality with his horrid
secrets as he'd always done. It was an amateurish approach and it was
imprudent for Reichert to use it with a hardened criminal." Reichert
was the one who blinked.

He tried hellfire. "... what you've done is you just sentenced
yourself to eternal life in hell, he yelled. Your ass is just gonna
burn the rest 'a your life... have you read Revelation? ... You ought'a
read the Book a' Revelation. Not only will you be on fire, but you're
gonna have sores and stuff happenin' all over your body..."

Guillén says Reichert at times seemed to be begging for just one little revelation.

When Jesus didn't work, Reichert took a lower road. It was just as
unsuccessful and exposed a kinky and voyeuristic side to the born-again
Christian sheriff. Trying to be "like two guys in a bar," Reichert
suggested grotesque scenarios that even seemed to take America's worst
serial killer by surprise. He asked Ridgway if he'd ever considered
cutting anything off the bodies, and keeping them in his freezer. 'No,"
said Gary, "I never have." But Reichert wanted to joke about that and
Gary, always agreeable, played along.

Reichert: Plus, your wife when, uh, open up a freezer and see a boob in there... Wouldn't be good?

Ridgway: Or a, or a clitoris in there, a couple of them, you know.

Reichert: You'd have a lot of explaining to do?

Ridgway: Uh-huh.

Reichert: (Laughs)

"The sheriff made the
suggestions of things to do to the bodies, not Gary." says Guillén.
"Gary was the straight man with Reichert providing very inappropriate
one-liners," Guillén said.

At another low point in his very unorthodox questioning, Reichert
asked Gary if he ever played doctor with the neighborhood girls growing
up. Ridgway allowed that he had with a cousin, saying he gave her a
penny to see her "what her vagina looked like."

"Big spender," Reichert laughs. "She was your first hooker- did you ever think of that?"

"That was a very ugly, unChristian side of Reichert," says Guillén,
"he turns an innocent little girl, a victim of Gary, into a hooker."

These creepy conversations and more can be seen on videos the Seattle Weekly posted with Guillén's authoritative account of the interrogations.

Criticizing the investigation is second-guessing for sure. But
Reichert, unlike the rest of the hard-working cops who did the best
they could in a difficult case, based a political career on revisionist
public relations images of him as being almost singlehandedly
responsible for the "capture." The P-I story reveals the professional
resentment over Reichert's blatant grandstanding.

"I frankly didn't see what catching the Green River killer had to do
with serving in Congress," Dave Ross told us. We'd have to agree, yet
that narrative, as incomplete and exaggerated as it is, served Dave
Reichert well in his campaign.

If Reichert had more to offer as a public servant, had more of a
record to point to after one term, this long ride he's taken on the old
murder case wouldn't be of much interest, no matter how disingenuous it
was.

But because he continues to use it as the centerpiece of an
otherwise drab congressional record, we think the public should know
the real story.

I'll tell you one thing, I'd rather have a man who will vote with the President to keep us safe, than a woman who would cut the balls off this nation. Dave Reichert cvotes right when it counts and defeating him would just take another R out of the House and rob the President of another vote for his program in Iraq.

KVI am 570 KHz Visit the burnt-out husk of one of the seminal right-wing talkers in all the land. Here's where once trilled the reactionary tones of Rush Limbaugh, John Carlson, Kirby Wilbur, Mike Siegel, Peter Weissbach, Floyd Brown, Dinky Donkey, and Bryan Suits.
Now it's Top 40 hits from the '60's & '70's aimed at that diminishing crowd who still remembers them and can still hear.

KTTH am 770 KHzRight wing home of local, and a whole bunch of syndicated righties such as Glennn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larsony, and for an hour a day: live & local David Boze.